SCP Foundation / Tropes N to R

SCP Foundation provides examples of the following tropes:

Tropes A to D | Tropes E to M | Tropes N to R | Tropes S to Z

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N

• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: A group calling itself "The Chaos Insurgency" cannot possibly be up to any good. Neither can the Church of the Broken God. Or the Sarkic Cults and their "fleshcrafters". The Church has since subverted this trope. While the name can and likely means to inspire wariness or fear, the Church (or rather, MEKHANE Themselves) are firmly for humanity.
• Nanomachines: SCP-204-1 is a particularly fight-prone cloud of those that eats meat. SCP-784-ARC is a man who now "lives" as a nanomachine colony. And SCP-1322 has plenty of nanomachines being delivered as a weapon.
• Narrator: SCP-1376 is a video camera that gives its recordings a narrator a la certain British nature documentaries.
  Subject: A static recording of a tennis ball placed on a table.
  Narration: As noon approaches, it grows increasingly confused, as the creatures around it show no sign of using it for its intended purpose. Struggling to attract their attention, it becomes ever more distressed as it finds itself completely immobile.
  • It may also be psychic (or at least very observant):
    Subject: An incidental recording of Dr. ██████ made by Dr. ████████ during unrelated experimentation.
    Narration: Despite the male's calm facade, his lust for his female companion is extraordinary. The degree to which his obsession reaches has become nearly unhealthy, dominating his thoughts at every turn. Wild fantasies course through his mind when he watches her when she doesn't notice.
    Researcher Note: Dr. ██████ was treated for a broken nose after being attacked by Dr. ████████ and both researchers have been placed on administrative leave for a period of no less than two (2) weeks pending disciplinary action and transfer to another site.
• Necessarily Evil: The SCP Foundation recognizes that it does very bad things, for the greater good of humanity.
  • The "Unfounded" mini-canon is built on the premise that this is not true, taking place in a universe where there is no Foundation, and yet things are still pretty much the same, with other Groups of Interest taking up the slack.
  • The Ethics Committee prevents the Foundation from committing unnecessary cruelty... which means that somebody has to decide when cruelty is necessary.
• Next Sunday A.D.: A few Series 3 SCPs start in dates after their initial publication, such as 2015 (SCP-2716), 2016 (SCP-2242), 2017 (SCP-2703), 2018 (SCP-2570) and 2019 (SCP-2217). It probably works better than Series 2 dating articles with predictions such as SCP-1032's Euclid revision set for January 2015 or SCP-1023 having the California Collapse in 2016. SCP-2998 plays with it — it starts in the same 2013 it was written, then the aliens invade in 2017, and ultimately a Reset Button is pressed and time goes back to 2013 again.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Has its own page.
• The Nicknamer: Overall, the Serpent's Hand has coined quite a few nicknames for the other groups in the world (some aren't always favorable, as seen below).
• Nicknaming the Enemy: The rivaling factions often have nicknames for one another.
  • The Serpent's Hand has coined two nicknames for the SCP Foundation and the Global Occult Coalition that have become very popular in parts of the anomalous community. People from Freeports or the Library may call out the Foundation as "jailors" when they're on rough terms, but the Hand always leaves no hesitance in calling the GOC "bookburners".
  • The Global Occult Coalition utilizes codewords to refer to rival agencies encountered during its operations. "Carcinoma" for the Chaos Insurgency, "Flanders" for the Oneiroi, "Reefer" for Gamers Against Weed, "Dawkins" for SAPPHIRE, et cetera.
  • The Church of the Broken God has a long history of name calling.
    • Back in the late Bronze Age, the Mekhanite Empire called those from the Kalmaktama Empire "Sarkics" or "Sarkites" (from Ancient Greek σάρξ sárx "flesh") for their Biomanipulation. This has persisted so much that their religion, Nälkä, is almost exclusively called "Sarkicism" by outsiders millennia later.
    • In the modern era, the splintered Mekhanic sects now call each other names. The Cogwork Orthodox Church calls Maxwellists "hummers" due to their use of computer fans as meditative aids, and the Church of Maxwell calls Cogwork Orthodoxists "tickers" due to the audible sound of their mechanized bodies.
  • Herman Fuller's Circus of the Disquieting makes deliberate Mondegreens to refer to the Foundation and the Coalition, calling them "Essie-Pee" and "Geo-Sea" respectively.
  • The Church of the Second Hytoth has apt nicknames like "stargazers" and "bloodletters" for their propitiation to an alien god, but the Fifthist Church (another group with extradimensional origins) calls them "squares" and "heptagons" due to not aligning with their quintary ideology.
• Nightmare Fuel: In-Universe:
  • SCP-425: A television set which broadcasts a weird vision by itself on the 8th, 16th, and 24th day of each month, even when unplugged. It's harmless, but if you're born on days of the month that are multiples of 8 (e.g. 8, 16, and 24), then the vision will include moving through a black hole, and experience "a crushing sense of oblivion". Then you will have recurring nightmares for weeks, and even extensive psychotherapy only reduced the nightmare to once a month.
  • 30% of SCP-1881-B players report lasting psychological effects afterwards, in the form of nightmares related to its contents (and occasional visual/auditory hallucinations).
• Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant: SCP-2980, a Big Red Devil that switched from terrorizing cultists to writing children's books. He likes reading his stories to anyone around his "nightlight" at 8:30 PM and the only effects these stories have is they sometimes give the listener a refreshing sleep and create new creatures to bedevil the Foundation like THE DEER (AKA "Damnbi") and Grog the cave monster.
  SCP-2980: That's why we do it, you know? Write, I mean. It's all about pleasing an audience.
  • Whoever or whatever Phobos Labs ("Bringing your nightmares to YOU since 1944") is made SCP-2850, wasps that cause you to grow extra teeth which hatch more wasps which then hide in yours and any other human dwelling to find more people to infest. They also mention making TrypanoClowns©.
  • Junior Researcher James, who's implied to be Dr. Elias's son. Two of his SCPs, SCP-789-J and SCP-078-J, which are funny if not childish. Then we have SCP-682-J, which are his drawings of SCP-682 and his versions of its description. One of the picture is SCP-682 eating a researcher.
• Nightmare Retardant: Invoked with the staff assigned to SCP-2006, a sentient sphere that can transform itself in order to cause fear in others. To prevent it from becoming something truly dangerous, staff members must watch low-quality horror movies and pretend they're terrified to trick it into only turning into harmless things.
• Nightmarish Factory: SCP-001:O5. A factory built by a wizard that used Blood Magic and Soul Power to manufacture Organic Technology from the slaves bred in the factory's basement. The founder accidentally made a Pact with the entity running it, and every so often a researcher disappears... This might be why the Foundation is so quick to send D-Class personnel to their deaths. If it can gorge on Red Shirts, it'll leave the more valuable people alone.
• 90% of Your Brain: SCP-1475 took a drug that allowed him to use 100% of his brain, giving him complete and total control over his body. Unfortunately, this also means that he now must manually do everything his body used to do automatically, like pumping blood through his veins or digesting food. This takes so much of his concentration that it has left him bedridden and unable to walk around because he can't move his muscles and keep up the formerly automated stuff at the same time. The author wrote this SCP specifically because they hated the "__% of your brain" trope.
• Nintendo Hard: Invoked by SCP-1633, which learns from players' actions and evolves to counter them.
• Nobody Here but Us Statues: SCP-173, in a manner similar to The Weeping Angels.
• No-Dialogue Episode: SCP-2521 is this out of necessity, as it is a weird Humanoid Abomination that takes away anything written about it and kidnaps anyone who talks about it. However, drawing pictures that describe it is just fine.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: SCP-517's reaction to SCP-087 in Episode 7 of Old Kansas Sector.
• "No. Just… No" Reaction: 076's reaction to being requested to approach one candidate for SCP-001.
  • Any time experiments are cancelled on SCPs that violate common sense or would possibly replicate something nasty.
  • From SCP-507s file: "I don’t care how much he grumbles about it; SCP-507 is not to be cleared for challenging SCP-076-2 to fifty rounds of Tic-Tac-Toe. Just… no."
• No Name Given: The O5. Most of the time, even their identification numbers are blanked out. Often, researchers have their names blanked out. D-Class, being expendable, don't have names, just numerical designations.
  • Averted with O5-12, the father of SCP-321, whose first name is Adam in a nod to the long tradition of meaningful names and nods towards The Bible in the Foundation^note Assuming that O5s are still normal humans, Adam was in the Federation since 18██, then the current O5-12 play this trope straight.
• No Fourth Wall: Andrew Swann's Proposal for SCP-001 takes a sledgehammer to the fourth wall, when it reveals that the Foundation found out they're a bunch of editable horror stories.
  • If S. Andrew Swann's proposal is a sledgehammer, then Operation Óvermeta and the related SCP-3500 is a wrecking ball. Continuing from the ending of the former, the Foundation decides to take advantage of the fact that they're fiction, exploiting the actual site's mechanics and integrating otherwise-non-canon site functions like the Grand Crosslinking into the story. This ultimately bites them in the ass when their endgame, to establish a unified canon, heavily destabilizes reality and sends it crashing down on unfortunate Author Avatar researchers.
• Non-Indicative Name: This tends to come up a lot when discussing the Foundation's means of categorizing SCPs, mainly because when a Foundation operative says an object is "safe", they mean "nothing will happen if it's left alone in a locked room". A hydrogen bomb is "safe" by those standards.
• Non-Malicious Monster: A number of SCPs are essentially just predatory organisms with anomalous traits.
• Noodle Implements: Some of the SCP objects become this, when SCP numbers are listed in incident reports or other articles; occasionally, the SCP with that designation will appear completely irrelevant to the context in which it was referenced. ^note This is often due to the original SCP being removed, and a new one filed under that number.
  • On the other extreme, there are the containment methods of SCP-1746 and the process to activate SCP-1731's anomalous effects.
• Noodle Incident:
  • Every single time you see "[DATA EXPUNGED]" or "[REDACTED]"; it seems like the whole idea is to have at least one such incident per SCP. The unspecified reason why SCP-447 must never come into contact with dead bodies is especially noodly and is occasionally referred to elsewhere (as seen below, it scares O5-2 shitless).
  • invokedSCP-231 is essentially a Noodle Incident played for Squick and horror rather than laughs. Whatever you think the notorious "Procedure 110-Montauk" is, it's much, MUCH worse... and even then, it's much worse than that. Speculation on what Procedure 110-Montauk is at times gets comparable to The Aristocrats — a FAQ had a bunch of [DATA REDACTED]s interspersed with mentions of an elephant, a bed of live cobras, Barbara Streisand's Greatest Hits, something that is over seventeen feet long, a staple remover, a feather boa that absolutely must be black (and not dark blue), and "plutonium splitting the atom." ^note Of course, The Aristocrats is only "funny" if you're not on the literal ass end of it...
  • The uncensored reports of SCP-835 demonstrate exactly what could be behind every Noodle Incident, and why you really don't want to know. On the other hand, it can also be seen as how a [DATA EXPUNGED] can be important for an article, as some people found the uncensored 835 reports to be quite disappointing.
  • According to SCP-963 and its implications, "just one guy" isn't an accurate term.
  • The first thumbnail in SCP-1231 is redacted, which is odd, considering that whatever you think the thumbnail contains is then created as a new thumbnail, and that the thousands of other thumbnails all derived from the first perception of the original.
  • The entirety of SCP-579.
  • Whatever lead to the photograph of SCP Agents wearing assless chaps out in public to contain SCP-1570. (NSFW, obviously.)
  • This trope is directly invoked in one of the experiments with SCP-1459. The researcher asks the machine to kill an instance of SCP-1459-1 using the word Noodles as a sort of creative prompt. A curtain then goes down, various sounds are heard, and when the curtain rises again, the instance of SCP-1459-1 is dead, clearly under bizarre circumstances. It is noted in the end of the log that nothing related to noodles ever happened.
  • The Trope Namer is mentioned in the experiment log for SCP-423. The SCP in question can insert itself into fiction, in this case manifesting as being involved with the Noodle Incident from Calvin and Hobbes. No further details about the incident were learned from this experiment, leaving the experimenters frustrated.
• No OSHA Compliance: In the SCP articles themselves, the containment procedures are designed to minimize danger, risk, and loss of life, even of the utterly expendable D-Class. In the testing logs, the prison-recruited D-class personnel are regularly treated to definitely unethical and probably lethal experimentation, often in cases where little useful information is likely to result, and are often subjected to the machinations of some of the more diabolical SCPs purely for the amusement of the ranking research staff.
• No-Sell: Former SCP-151-D exhibited this along with other Marty Stu traits, shrugging off effects of other SCPs just because. His termination log consists much of the same, until he's finally destroyed... rather messily. invoked
• No Sense of Direction: SCP-920, also known as Mr. Lost. Try to take him somewhere, or just walk with him for a while, and you will get lost. (However, apparently because all the super-deadly gets old if everything is super-deadly, the description has a notice that lost means "lost" as in "misplaced" and not some horrible fate. However, you can be lost to pretty much anywhere in the world. And it's likely you'll still die of thirst or cold if you get lost with him in a desert or a snowy area.)
  • When they tried to contain him, a whole facility got lost. It remained where it was but nobody could ever find it, leading to its closure due to running out of supplies.
• Nose Shove: SCP-108.
• Not-So-Harmless Villain: Many of the SCPs. In particular is SCP-387, a set of sentient Legos. Ordinarily they're benign, and even kind of cute. But put a knockoff set of Legos nearby, and they will do something Redactable.
• Not Using the "Z" Word: It's very obvious that SCP-008 is a zombie virus, but the article never refers to it as such.
• Nothing Is Scarier:
  • SCP-1057, the Absence of a Shark. It's empty space, raw void, that nonetheless swims around in the water with the shape and mentality of an uncommonly irritable tiger shark. Being made to ham-fistedly illustrate a point by a pretentious group of anomaly artists, it was released in a public setting and attacked three people, two fatally... while the fleeing crowd trampled five to death in their panic. The idea of a shark thus proved more dangerous than there being a shark, doubly illustrated by the very distinct lack of shark in the anomaly's 3D space.
  • SCP-2154 is a telescope that allows the real-time observation of space. Approximately 72% of stars viewable by mundane means cannot be seen through it, which means that either stars are going out very quickly or something very large ad opaque is blocking them. It is confirmed that a mix of both is most likely true, but the reader never learns what the matter is and the foundation doesn't know either. The author confirms that the point of the article is not about why the stars are going out or being blocked, but rather that humans have no idea what is currently happening in space.
• Nuclear Option: Most (if not all) Sites have on-site nuclear warheads, to be detonated in the event of a breach by a Keter-class SCP or Site failure. But they are actually afraid to try it on SCP-682 because it might not only survive, it could become even stronger.
• The Nudifier: The intended use of SCP-1755 by its creators, until the Foundation contained it and discovered that the worms are bringing the cotton plant close to extinction and might cause a collapse in the textile industry.
• Number of the Beast: While SCP-666 is not overtly Satanic, SCP-616 is decidedly more hellish, and has clergy on staff when necessary. The actual religious requirements are invented, though.
  • Fridge Brilliance that SCP-616 is the hellish one, see note on the Number of the Beast page.
  • Giving 666 yen to SCP-261 will provide some Devilish treats.
• Nutritional Nightmare: SCP-807, the Heart Attack on a Plate. Any food placed on it will be turned into this trope, and consuming it will invariably cause a heart attack within 5 minutes.
  • Among the items from SCP-261 is a "Turduchocken", an item described as "Balls of fried turkey, each containing a smaller ball of fried duck containing a chocolate candy with a fried chicken center", described by the label as containing 450% the typical adult human requirement of saturated fat. Also, "Tastee Bird Spicy Lime Snack!!!" is a "reconstituted, de-calcified parrot skeleton in a tangy broth with celery and cilantro and lime", containing 300% the daily recommended amount of sodium.

O

• Obsessive Love Letter: SCP-1269, apparently a mailbox that sends stalkerish letters to female owners.
  • SCP-962, which sends such love letters to humanity.
• Odd Couple: SCP-1710 1 and 2, an Eldritch Abomination and a pleasant British housewife, respectively, who were turned into trees by a Trickster God.
  SCP-1710-1: We were not always thus. We were the Serrated Void. We were That Which Rends. We were blades, edges, angles. We moved, we ravaged, we sharped.
  SCP-1710-2: What was that? Sorry, I was distracted by those bees. Silly little buggers, they are, buzzing about. Oh, they tickle so!
• Oh, Crap!:
  • In interview 507G, Said by an alternate version of SCP-507 after he realizes what's going to happen to him.
  SCP-507-A Oh. Bugger.
  Closing Statement: Subsequent testing revealed that SCP-507's abilities have no biological basing, and that severed pieces will still “shift” along with the main body.
  • In SCP-5000, Pietro Wilson could only utter a "Fuck me" when the Foundation released a global message revealing their existence and their intent to exterminate mankind.
• Old Shame: SCP-1851-EX is an in-universe example. Before the Civil War, the Foundation's D-classes were composed of slaves who escaped their masters; the "D" referred to "Drapetomania," a "mental illness" that caused slaves to have an "unnatural" lack of submission and obsess over fleeing captivity. When it's suggested they destroy all evidence of this embarrassing fact, the Foundation insists on keeping the information on file specifically because it's an embarrassing fact.
• Omniscient Council of Vagueness: Aside from the Foundation, there's SCP-1659 AKA Directorate K, whose affected "members" number in the hundreds of thousands. Its mission is incomprehensible beyond apparently wanting to fix the SCP-verse in its own way and influencing foodies.
• Omniscient Morality License: A lot of these researchers are worse than Class-D personnel (who are "recruited" from prison). Some get demoted to Class D.
• Once for Yes, Twice for No: SCP-3082: When 3082-2 is communicating with a somewhat broken drone:
  Can you spin this gadget's blades one time for "no" and two times for "yes"?
  [The drone is heard activating its motors twice in quick succession.]
• Ominous Message from the Future: While it is unclear exactly who or what is responsible for its creation, SCP-6135, an anomalous recording of Billy Joel's We Didn't Start the Fire, contains several additional verses which appear to predict future events (of course, the documentation in question was written in 1991, so many of these events will be familiar to modern readers). The real kicker comes at the end, when it's revealed that "Research into the identities of Tim McVay and Harry Potter is ongoing."
• One Myth to Explain Them All: Many SCPs are familiar myths from different cultures, such as the Leviathan, AnantaShesha, and various kinds of youkai (e.g., Gashadokuro). It is unclear whether these are the origins of the myths, or simply named after them.
• Orifice Invasion: SCP-2484, anomalous mayonnaise: "Masses from 235 g to 804 g will actively attempt to make their way inside vertebrate animals through any available means (including oral, nasal, aural, ocular, rectal, or genital orifices, open wounds, and sweat pores)."
• Origami Gag: Hinted at in one incident with subject SCP-914, which produced a glass orb that inspired a volunteer to take a piece of paper and create something inexplicably indescribable.
  D-8742, upon contact with the object, requested a sheet of paper, which he folded into a paper [DATA EXPUNGED].
  Update: It's been five months since D-8742's termination, and that thing is still in the air.
• Origin Story:
  • Some of SCP-001 proposals are about how the Foundation and sometimes how many groups of interest are formed.
  • SCP-5497 ('What Never Was') serves as a possible origin for the world explored in the Unfounded canon.
• Orphaned Series: Happens frequently with series and even entire canons. Writers begin writing, create a few articles, then lose interest or initiative before completing them. Due to the wiki nature of the site, though, other writers can pick it back up.
• Our Angels Are Different: Averted as the Foundation goes to extensive lengths to document the fact that Dr. Clef's proposal for SCP-001 is indeed a bona fide Judeo-Christian Angel without any major subversions — and possibly the Jophiel himself, who guards the real, genuine Garden of Eden. It does, however, play more to the descriptions in Holy texts as opposed to cultural depictions; for instance, appearing to have as many as 108 wings and being made of fire.
  • SCP-2610-A thinks his "visitor" is an angel ("Her flesh rippled and tore, and light shined through the cracks like the sun.") and she speaks to him, as he remembers it, like one: "'Soft and silent, Child of God,/for you have been chosen to lead His people/and create for Him a New Eden.'"
• Our Cryptids Are More Mysterious: Several examples:
  • SCP-2901 is based on the mythical Mothman - rather than being a singular entity however, there's a whole species of them.
  • SCP-6254 is clearly inspired by the legendary Michigan Dogman.
• Our Dragons Are Different:
  • SCP-682 has been called a "tarasque" in the Lord Blackwood and Bellerverse tales; SCP-1420 seem to be working towards a viable dragon; SCP-1013 is a cockatrice; SCP-1779 are tiny dragons that eat change (actually, they're real dragons, which apparently feed on items of monetary value rather than nutritional value, and the more expensive the food, the bigger the dragon).
  • In the greater Foundation-verse, dragons are a vulnerable population of anomalous organisms whose conservation puts the Foundation at odds with preserving the veil, making their exploitation (e.g. Ambrose Restaurants using hatchlings to cook food) or annihilation inevitable. In SCP-1762, they wither away and die because of humanity's increasing lack of belief in fantasy. In SCP-3844, Tharnock weakens for the same reasons and is eventually killed, though more of his kind suddenly show up after his passing. In SCP-6002, they are part of a kingdom of organisms called the aeterns and lack the weaknesses of 1762 or Tharnock, but are wiped out and erased from history by destroying their corresponding genomes in 6002, hoping the SCP-6002-B infection ravaging the tree would go with them. It does not.
• Our Ghouls Are Creepier: SCP-6387 offers a unique variation on the ghoul. Turns out this one isn't malicious, and was in fact trying to save someone who was accidentally buried alive.
• Our Giants Are Bigger: SCP-5634, who appears to be the Foundationverse's equivilant to Paul Bunyan.
• Our Werewolves Are Different: Happy Howlidays, a Christmas Episode, portrays five different types of werewolves, with Class-1 werewolves being fully voluntary and in control of their changes, while Class-5 werewolves are vicious killing machines that can spread their infection through contact alone, and are capable of regenerating from a single finger and coming back from death. The infection is neutralized by nutmeg.
• Over Night Age Up: There's a Cymbal-Banging Monkey in SCP-983 that is able to rapidly age a person on their birthday with each ring until they die. It stops only if the person sings along or dies.
• Over-the-Top Secret: In one 001 proposal, the newly appointed O5 council tries to figure out why O5-13 is the only one around from the old council. When they ask the Ethics Committee, they get the answer that it is "Above [their] clearance".^note Some stories imply that the Committee has equal, or even higher security clearance than the O5s.
  O5-11: Above your security clearance? You're on the Council, there simply aren't things "outside your jurisdiction".

P

• Painting the Medium: Has its own page.
• Panacea:
  • SCP-500 are pills that cure any disease, but there's just about fifty of them and they're impossible to replicate perfectly (though knockoffs can work if you're lucky). Later, SCP-427: the Lovecraftian Locket was developed out of one of the pills and has eclipsed it in use, although with the possible side effect of mutating you into a squid.
  • One of the items dispensed by SCP-261 is a drink can that has Indonesian text on it claiming it can cure any kind of disease. While it's unknown if that statement is entirely true, a D-class with prostate cancer who drank it was found to be cured. Unfortunately, only one can was released and due to the nature of SCP-261 it's extremely unlikely to appear again.
• Paranormal Mundane Item: A decent number of artifacts contained by the foundation bear some resemblance to some form of product intended to be sold to the public, to the detriment of anyone unfortunate enough to find one. In addition, there are a number of organizations of interest that specialize in the production and or sale of such artifacts.
  • Dr. Wondertainment is a person and or company dedicated to making anomalous toys, with less than stellar standards of product safety.
  • The Factory is a factory in an unknown location that mass produces anomalous appliances with guaranteed sinister motives.
  • Marshal, Carter, and Dark is a black market club that seeks out such items to sell to it's clientele. They take great care that their products do not harm their owners, but the same can't be said for what the artifacts may require in order to function.
  • SCP-261 is a vending machine that sells a number food items similar to the real-world trademarks, but with some really bizarre properties.
• Parody Sue: Several. Most notably, SCP-10101-j, SCP-777-j, and SCP-496-j (whose name references the original Mary Sue). SCP-316, later terminated with extreme enthusiasm by the resident Wonka, reads much like one but was apparently intended as a serious SCP.
  • The tale starring "Agent Doctor Merry Sue" initially reads as a textbook example, with only a few hints that things aren't as they seem, until it's finally revealed that she's a literal Reality Warper trying to beat the Foundation by joining them. She was fed to 682.
• Pass the Popcorn: Defied. According to SCP-6930, guffawing at a sapient anomaly's containment even if the methods used are valid is a pretty easy way to violate the protocols of the Ethics Committee. In the case of the aforementioned article, it got so bad that one of the lead researchers had to revise the containment procedures to be unusually generous as both payback and to stop another Pattern Screamer from going insane.
• The Password Is Always "Swordfish": Shown in the terminal logs for SCP-2317, with the lower-clearance agents having weaker password sense:
  • Jonathan Vance, Clearance Level 0: password9910 (played straight)
  • Sgt. Hannibal Masterson, Clearance Level 1: 1234Ilovethemarinecorps (long password, but familiar phrase)
  • Dr. Jackson Choi, Clearance Level 2: beethovens9th123 (played straight)
  • Dr. Victoria Fellini, Clearance Level 3: Sierra charLy pOPPA (fairly robust Fun with Acronyms)
  • Dr. Kain P. Crow, Clearance Level 4: sometimesifeeellikeamotherlesschild (pretty strong, but lacking randomness)
  • O5-13, Clearance Level O5: sIERRa tANGo CASpER 3CH0. (averted entirely), plus an additional short paragraph that has to be typed down to the exact letter within 60 seconds, with some intentional spelling and capitalization errors for good measure.
• Pay Evil unto Evil: Guest Researcher Dr W introduced an ordinary frightened kid to SCP-682, and then a kid of the same age with deadened emotional reactions. Both were messily killed by SCP-682. So, Dr. Clef promptly introduced Dr. W to SCP-682, with the same result.
  "Fucking sadistic asshole. I've got no sympathy for that moron whatsoever. Introducing children to this fucking monster? What the hell…"
  Assistant Director Clef
• Perfection Is Static:
  • SCP-7179 is an afterlife consisting of an island paradise with a beach house, three willing and non-sentient sex partners, and all the food, drink, and drugs you could ever want. But there's no way to leave and you're stuck there for eternity, so you will enjoy yourself for a few years at most before you start going insane from boredom and loneliness.
  • In the tale Visions of a Better World, one of the possible futures has the Foundation infect the world's population with SCP-217, a virus that converts people and animals into clockwork beings. Their idea is that illness will become nonexistent and injuries can be easily treated by repairing them as one repairs a broken-down bicycle. Once the whole world is transformed, the clockwork humans no longer have emotions, curiosity, or imagination, and there's no further progress to be made and nothing to work toward. They no longer see the point of living and die.
• Perfect Pacifist People: One of the biggest factors of an SCP-001 event is that everyone on Earth becomes aware of its inevitable fate and heavy decreases in violence are to occur.
• Perpetual Motion Machine: So many SCPs (labeled ectoentropic) ignore the laws of thermodynamics, being able to produce infinite amounts of matter, energy, or their constant movements could be used as a power generation tool. Sadly, most are either too valuable or dangerous to use.
• Person of Mass Destruction: People who get SCP designations, and especially Keter classifications, are generally contained because they fall into this category.
• Perspective Reversal: Scantron's Proposal of SCP-001 is a case file written by the Unusual Incidents Unit in 1954, which identifies the Foundation as Confirmed Anomaly 3.
• Pet the Dog - Most sentient SCPs are accommodated reasonably well, depending on their potential danger, ability to escape, and willingness to cause harm. The most (relatively) harmless are given furnished rooms and are generally given whatever they request, as long as it doesn't violate security. They are, of course, not allowed to leave the facility.
  • SCP-103 was the only SCP that the Foundation actually released. It says something about the Foundation's Well-Intentioned Extremism that a man whose only power is that he never gets hungry is the only SCP ever let go without being terminated (and even that is, according to the comments, a controversial decision). He got retconned to having worms in his stomach that fly out and eat people and having voluntarily reported back to Foundation care.
  • Some of the SCPs are given the best care possible. Every effort is made not to upset the autistic Muck Monster girl, for example, and the harmless and friendly living eyeballs have free run of their site. And one of the first tests of the vending machine was "something Cassy will like," Cassy being a mentally normal young woman who exists in a 2-D world and was actually created by the Foundation itself.
  • Several SCPs which fall into a self contained microcosm, pocket universe, etc, or other SCPs that were created by the Foundation on accident, respect or outright revere the Foundation. On the other hand, some fall into a Rage Against the Heavens.
  • Some SCPs that are relatively harmless are just glad to have someone talking to / using them again, in many cases having been abandoned for years after their original owner died.
  • SCP-2031 is a type of army ant that incapacitates large mammals before invading them, turning them into a colony, and mimicking their behavior with disturbing accuracy. It's also implied that this places the victim into an And I Must Scream situation. However, at one point, the Foundation sets up an experiment with a human family infested by the ants and a bunch of animals in the same situation. The ants inside the humans take care of the animals like a normal human does, herding groups and feeding them. One day, however, one of the colonies has to leave the animal corpse they're inhabiting since it can't be supported anymore. The human colonies then react accordingly, first prodding the corpse, and then later burying it solemnly when they realize that the animal's gone for good. At the end, it's stated that the Foundation will infest a Golden Retriever puppy for the human colonies. This may be the first time the Foundation has willingly accommodated a non-sentient SCP beyond what it needs.^note The ants are actually The Worm That Walks, though they willingly adjust their behavior and intelligence to match the creature they're inside of.
  • The Foundation are letting POI-2190-2 unusually nice, considering that she's the focal point of an anomaly. SCP-2190 acts as a kind of morality pet for the Foundation. The story of how they gave a couple that went through hell the happy ending they deserved while simultaneously containing an anomaly keeps the Foundation suicide rate... lower.
  • One of the researchers involved takes 2422-C under her wing once she realizes what's involved with them. She goes on to pass on the "duty" of protecting as much of their human dignity as possible to a successor she trusts.
  • SCP-3355 is an Army AI originally designed for disaster management who, after being abandoned, took up the mantle of St Nick for the destitute children of Chicago. The Foundation's containment protocol for an incredibly intelligent, resourceful military AI? They set up a charity as a front for his operations and a source of income for him to buy presents.
• The Phoenix: SCP-5467, a species of fire-breathing birds, hunted to extinction by the Daevites.
• Pieces of God: That particular faction's not called "Church Of The Broken God" for nothing.
• Pilgrimage: SCP-036 is about Yazidi pilgrims who use planes to travel to a site where they can be reborn.
• Plague Doctor:
  • SCP-049. This being the Foundation, naturally he's a horrifying Deadly Doctor.
  • Parodied with SCP-049-J, an... interesting individual.
• Plague Zombie: Anyone infected by SCP-008 is turned into a zombie over the course of several hours. They are capable of spreading the virus to others as well.
• Playing Card Motifs:
  • SCP-2156 is a college student who became so obsessed with solitaire and its symbolism and numerology that she broke reality.
• Playing with Fire: SCP-2814 can give people this power, plus very delusional thoughts (or are they?). Its creator's true intention was to use the mask's victims to feed the sun ("Our Radiant Father"), but three other stars ("Father's brothers") are stealing the energy away — and the victims aren't quite dead, including the mask's creator (who realizes this probably wasn't the best way to help "father").
• Pocket Dimension: The Three Portlands, a pocket dimension that's connected to Portland, Oregon, Portland, Maine and Portland, UK. 3Ports is essentially a refuge for anomalous humans and other beings, having their own micro-society, down to various para tech companies present in the dimension.
• Police Are Useless:
  • How the Foundation sees the FBI's Unusual Incidents Unit. More recent works have begun to portray them as competent, though the Foundation itself still likes to look down on them.
  • Usually averted or justified with normal police departments when they show up, as they simply aren't equipped to deal with the anomalous, and any anomalies they come across are usually swiftly taken over by the Foundation, who have agents embeded in many police forces.
  • SCP-2826 invokes this, causing a number of dimwitted, clumsy entities dressed like members of the local police force to appear at the nearest gathering of officers, and attempt to assist them^note Part of its effect is that actual police officers will think they recognize them as fellow officers. Since they are dimwitted, clumsy, and have little to no understanding of actual police procedure or how to use most of their equipment, their "assistance" invariably ends up hindering the actual police. As well, if exposed to things like tear gas or pepper spray, they automatically release a gust of air that clears the gas around them.
• Post-Modern Magik: The Foundation uses science to study many of the seemingly supernatural and/or magical anomalies.
• Power Incontinence: Apparently a problem with mammoths:
  • SCP-2082: A wooly mammoth clone that caused uncontrollable Ice Age conditions; its species is implied to have caused the Ice Age itself.
  • SCP-2184: A steppe (to distinguish it from SCP-2082) mammoth (just one) that destroys any technology created after the Stone Age; the more advanced the object is the larger and more destructive its effect. Its aversion to post-Stone Age technology is so great it walked through a forest fire unscathed because the fire was started with a match.
• Power Levels:
  • SCPs are classified with an "object class" that, in a subversion of this trope, is not a measure of how dangerous an SCP is, but rather, how difficult it is to keep in containment: perfectly harmless SCPs can still be difficult to contain, while an SCP that can be easily contained can still be dangerous. Object classes consist of the following levels:
    • "Safe": Easily contained and not liable to escape. As an analogy, if you lock it in a box and do nothing, it will likely remain in the box.
    • "Euclid": Requires a significant amount of resources to contain, and containment may not be reliable. By default, any SCP that exhibits sentience is classified as Euclid due to the inherent unpredictability of entities capable of independent thought and action. If you lock it in a box and do nothing, it may escape, or it may stay put, but there's no way to know which will happen.
    • "Keter": Highly difficult to contain, often requiring vast amounts of resources and complex containment procedures. Also highly liable to escaping. If you lock it in a box and do nothing, it will very likely get out and cause trouble.
    • "Thaumiel": An SCP that is specifically used to contain other SCPs.
    • "Neutralized": SCPs that are no longer anomalous due to being disabled or destroyed.
    • "Apollyon": The SCP is either uncontainable, or expected to inevitably breach containment soon, usually with highly destructive (and often apocalyptic) consequences and requiring a massive Foundation effort to handle.
    • "Archon": Can be contained, but the Foundation has deemed it in their best interest not to.
  • Supplementing the object class system is the "Anomaly classification system". In it, object class is renamed to "containment class", and two additional ratings are added to it:
    • "Disruption class" defines the size of anomaly's sphere of influence and the difficulty of negating that influence, if containment fails. The lowest tier of disruption might affect one person or a specific individual; the highest would be a world-spanning or even universe-spanning outcome. From smallest to largest: Dark, Vlam, Kenneq, Ekhi, and Amida.
    • "Risk class" is the closest thing to Power Levels played fully straight, and indicates how anomalous an item's effect is. The weakest classification exerts almost-nonexistant anomalous effects, while the strongest's effects are instantaneous, tangible, and very likely to cause death. From safest to riskiest: Notice, Caution, Warning, Danger, and Critical.
• The Power of Hate: The Brazen Heart, the cult behind SCP-2427, "express extreme animosity for the Foundation and humanity at large":
  The Christian tells you that hatred is wrong.
  The Buddhist tells you that hatred is a distraction.
  The atheist tells you that hatred is unhealthy.
  [DATA EXPUNGED] tells you that hatred is fun.
  Hatred, in reality, is but one of many invaluable tools to return Creation to purity. Hatred can work in harmony with love. The nature of the path to purity is irrelevant; all that matters is the sunrise at the end of the path.
• Powered by a Forsaken Child:
  • SCP-1875 is powered by two. They ain't exactly happy about it.
  • SCP-1514 "Are the stars pretty"
  • SCP-2814; see Playing With Fire.
• Power Perversion Potential: SCP-447-2 can be used as a personal lubricant, unless you're a necrophiliac.
• Precursors: Going into the very distant past, you get SCP-6204 (Sapiensaurus), a species of intelligent theropods that developed an advanced civilization over 100 million years ago. More recent species include SCP-1000 (Bigfoot) (yes, the Bigfoot) and SCP-4000 (the Fae). It's safe to say the Foundationverse has ancient advanced civilizations coming out the wazoo.
• Pretty Butterflies: SCP-408 is a sapient flock of color-changing, illusion-creating butterflies.
• Primal Fear: Many of SCP-1881's stage iterations invoke these, such as a level appearing to be upside-down without gravity being reversed to match, a shmup stage with no enemies (leaving the player floating aimlessly through empty space for several minutes before the level ended), and being trapped in a maze with an increasingly large number of deadly creatures.
• Produce Pelting: SCP-504 is a breed of tomato that throws itself if someone cracks a bad joke. If the joke is bad enough, it will break the sound barrier.
  Item: Three mature SCP-504 tomatoes, one for each test subject.
  Subject: After the introduction to the following news item, "Bomb blows hole in Lenin statue", the three following jokes were made.
  Test Subject 1: Ooh, that's gonna leave a Marx.
  Result: Tomato number one 'twitched', but did not displace from its original location.
  Test Subject 2: BBC is just Stalin the good news.
  Result: Tomato clocked at 152 mph. Chipped tooth and hairline jaw fracture.
  Test Subject 3: That blows.
  Result: Tomato clocked at [REDACTED]. Subject is hospitalized with a massive skull fracture.
  • Interestingly enough, when told The Funniest Joke of All Time from Monty Python's Flying Circus, it exploded.
  • When shown on a later episode of Saturday Night Live, high-speed photography showed that the tomato changed velocity several times (including a brief jump backward), as if unable to decide whether the sketch was genuinely lame or just "bad" in an ironic sense.
• Prophecy Armor: SCP-711 ("Paradoxical Insurance Policy"). SCP-711 is a device capable of receiving transmissions from the future. It has received one such transmission from a future Foundation agent, but the governing O5 Council has ordered that the transmission never be sent. Since the Foundation knows the message will be sent at some point in the future, as long as it hasn't been sent then the Foundation can't be completely destroyed, because that would leave no one to send the message.
• Pseudo-Santa: A couple Christmas Stories, The 12 Days of Site-87's Christmas and Happy Howlidays, imply that Dr. Wondertainment either is Santa Claus, or is filling in for him for the Foundation specifically.
• Public Domain Artifact - Spring Cleaning, a story involving a bunch of these.
• Public Domain Soundtrack: SCP-2424, a Mega Man styled video game boss that somehow ended up in the real world, has his own chiptune theme music that plays whenever he becomes actively hostile, and it sounds appropriately awesome (scroll to the bottom of the page to hear it). The song itself is RoccoW - "Break-A-Leg" from the free music archive.
• Pumpkin Person: SCP-2331 ("SCRAVECROW"). SCP-2331 is a scarecrow with a pumpkin head that has a fluorescent blue glow inside it. He creates raves and acts as a DJ at them.
• Pun: SCP-2268 was written because of a typo. Specifically, "load" became "loaf."
• Pun-Based Title - A few names assigned on the SCP lists: "The Pied Pipe", "Builder Bear", "Glory Hole" (a hole to another dimension)...
• Punny Name - The task forces are full of these - "Moloch 'n Load", "See No Evil", "Cater Duty", "The Suge Knights"...
• The Purge: The first people the Foundation killed in SCP-5000 were those of its own membership that had not been hit by whatever "cured" them.
• Purple Prose:
  • SCP-696's novel:
  Excerpt: As the blistered moon sank higher into the clouds, from behind the last faltering light ray espied a wrathful visage. Shabathh Centhal'Pr, a spineless cur twisted into humanoid form. Its pernicious iniquity of unthinkable gyrations splayed errant madness, yet through the shroud one could see its face was quite rectangular.
  • SCP-2591's way of speaking. His side of an interview tends to end with [redacted for brevity]. It turns out he's from the world of an unfinished opera whose author quit after Giuseppe Verdi said even he couldn't help his writing.
• Purpose-Driven Immortality: SCP-3814 is an anomalous game of Tag that compels you to pass on the tag. It is even able to keep dying "It" people alive until they tag someone.
• Putting the Band Back Together: The point of the Resurrection canon is to do this, turning MTF Omega-7 "Pandora's Box" into MTF Alpha-9 "Last Hope".
• Pyrrhic Victory: The eventual termination of SCP-096, caused as a result of Incident 096-1-A

R

• Rage Against the Author: In S. Andrew Swann's SCP-001 proposal of SCP-001. The Foundation has a Containment Protocol ready to neutralize its own authors, although they don't plan to implement it. Yet.
• Rage Against the Heavens: For the Global Occult Coalition, one of the Foundation's rival organizations: if God exists, then it's their job to kill it.
• Rainbow Motif: One of the entries in the Log of Anomalous Items. All written text regarding a certain notebook will be one of six colors (red, orange, yellow, green, blue or violet).
• Rank Inflation: The Foundation officially has six object classes to start: Safe (can be left mostly alone), Euclid (presents extra challenges to containment), Keter (active security threat), Thaumiel (can be used to contain other objects, but isn't always harmless), Apollyon (cannot be contained and is en route to end the world or upend the status quo within the next century), and Neutralized (no longer anomalous.) However, there's a lot of weird, specific scenarios that end up escaping that spectrum, requiring the addition of quite a few "esoteric classes" as patterns to their containment procedures become established. Notable ones include:
  • Tiamat: Containing the object requires the Foundation to be less considerate about the Veil or security, taking a more proactive approach to directly engage it.
  • Enochian: An anomaly that is now a part of consensus reality but does not or cannot necessitate the Ennui Protocol.
  • Cernunnos: Containment is theoretically an option, but it's so costly so as to be out of reach for even the Foundation. Also has a Good Counterpart in the form of Flor Galana, when the anomaly is of some use to the Foundation.
  • Hiemal: The anomalies present naturally contain each other, and direct Foundation intervention may make the problem worse.
  • Maksur: The anomaly is fragmented into other unique objects and entities under the Foundation's care.
  • Argus: The Foundation is not the correct group required to contain the anomaly.
  • Eparch: The file does not describe something anomalous, but needs to be secured due to it being caught in something that is anomalous.
  • Radix/Yesod: The anomaly has been hired by the Foundation.
  • Ticonderoga: Not containing the anomaly outright is a viable option.
  • Memet: The anomaly defeats or contains itself without simply disappearing entirely.
• Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: Dr. Clef killed a particularly obnoxious decommissioned SCP with explosive decompression after said SCP used it’s powers to rape the female researchers assigned to it.
• Rasputinian Death: Once the squad sent to seize the Factory found its mastermind, they hung him with his own entrails, cut him down, had him drawn and quartered, and then burned the remains - all while he continued to shout disturbing things. And yet the dead man was still found when the O5-1 needed help.
• Ravens and Crows: SCP-2106 is a flock (or "unkindness") of ravens that can become a woman named Jessica.
• Readings Are Off the Scale: One item in the log of anomalous items is a white plastic halo that shines and floats above anyone who hasn't committed any of the seven deadly sins, but glows red when put on anyone else's head. It melted itself down after being placed above Dr. ████ ██████'s head.
• Real Event, Fictional Cause: There are many of these, which usually double as Historical In-Jokes:
  • The explosion of Mount St. Helens was caused by a SCP-076 containment breach.
  • SCP-081 caused all recorded instances of spontaneous human combustion.
  • SCP-089 has announced and prevented (or at least reduced the impact of) many disasters throughout history, such as the Great New Orleans Fire of 1788, the 1970 Bhola cyclone and the Taiping Rebellion. However, it's unclear if the SCP actually causes the disasters or merely offers an extreme means of stopping them (involving sacrificing a baby to it).
  • Both the image and the redacted clues show that SCP-435 was responsible for Castle Bravo, the largest American nuclear detonation.
  • SCP-453 caused the Great Neapolitan Earthquake.
  • SCP-687 apparently caused the Cleveland Torso Murders.
  • SCP-1120: It's revealed that the eruption of Vesuvius was caused by a man who was trying to bury the numerous instances of SCP-1120 in the ashes before they overran any more towns.
  • SCP-1427 is apparently why the despotic Democratic People's Republic of Korea still governs Korea above the 38th parallel; it attempts to fry the brains of the nearest ~20,000 humans who aren't already under its effects, but humans who are authoritarian-submissive, like millions of North Koreans are, are immune to it, so the Foundation attempts to keep the entire country's population subservient and prevent any attempts at its democratization or destabilization.
  • SCP-1529 is apparently responsible for killing the first man to ever climb Mt. Everest and about half of all the people who've died climbing it since.
  • SCP-1574 is implied to have some connection to the Boxing Day Tsunami, despite being on the other side of the world. It may or may not have been caused by aliens from its home planet who had come looking for it. The Boxing Day Tsunami itself has been caused by no less than three different SCPs, including an 001 Proposal, SCP-090, SCP-1574, and even an asteroid brought down by the Foundation. It got to the point that "things what caused teh INDIAN OCEAN TSUNAMI is specifically listed as an overdone cliche.
  • SCP-2090's containment involved the creation of Hurricane Hugo, an actual hurricane. Oh, and a bizarre ritual called basketball.
  • The "Big Bloop", a Real Life extremely loud underwater sound, was caused by SCP-169, an enormous undersea creature which is at least 1,000 km in length. The Foundation had a spy in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who tried to prevent the public from learning of the Bloop, but failed.
  • The underground fires in Centralia, Pennsylvania are actually the Norse fire giant Surtr (SCP-1179) waking up.
  • SCP-966 is implied to be the cause of sleep paralysis.
  • According to CODE NAME: The Truth, SCP-184 is responsible for the expansion of the universe. Beyond GN-Z11, there's nothing but defective copies of the Milky Way being repeated over and over.
• Reality Warper: They are called "Type Greens". They are treated extremely seriously by both the Foundation and the GOC, because Reality Warping Is Not a Toy.
• Reality-Writing Book: SCP-140 is a very specific version; the book writes itself and alters reality as a consequence, given a suitable form of ink or ink substitute. SCP-687 is a text adventure video game with broader abilities.
• Reconstruction: The "Resurrection" Canon hub is a major attempt at reconstructing the so-called "lolfoundation" ethos that fell out of favour several years previously.
• Red Herring: In-Universe, the Foundation sets up multiple (or none) fake SCP-001 proposals to misdirect intruders as to the true nature of SCP-001. The O5 Orientation and The Truth even imply that there is no true SCP-001 amongst the files.
• Red Shirt: The Class D's, of course.
  • Parodied in SCP-2063.
• Red String of Fate: SCP-2203, a carnival "love machine" that can make perfect matches (it can even account for the subject being aromantic and asexual and match them up with perfect friends). As long as you follow its hints on how to get close to your match and don't, for example, get matched with someone who's already happy with their partner or attack your match's current partner and get demoted to D-class everything will be just fine.
• Refugee from TV Land: SCP-2424 is a video game boss transported to the real world (given it's a Cyborg Walrus, probably a Maverick?). And apparently the protagonist appeared too, bearing a rather revealing document in his possession.
• Regional Redecoration: Has happened on more than a few occasions, but they've all been covered up as just being part of Earth's natural geography. For example, the Marianas Trench wasn't around before a massive containment breach. It also wasn't initially underwater.
• Released to Elsewhere: D-Class personnel are assured that they'll be freed at the end of the month if they cooperate ("released like homicidal bunny rabbits into the wild," as said in the D-Class Orientation). Even if they manage to survive the various monsters, artifacts, and testing procedures, they are still executed at the end of the month anyway.^note Of course, SCP canon being what it is, there are interpretations they're forcibly kept as D-Class until they finally get murdered by a SCP.
  • As the site has developed the idea that D-class personel are terminated monthly has fallen out of favor with the writers due to being stupid enough to break suspension of disbelief so the idea isn't very commonly used anymore.
• Replacement Goldfish: SCP-1976 was made by a man to be this for his family after he died of a brain tumor. He thought its powers would make his family see it as their husband and father, instead it caused his wife to think it was her father while his children weren't old enough for its powers to work. It currently causes anyone within its activation criteria who looks at it to think its their father while their real father becomes a stranger.
• Research, Inc.: The Foundation benefits commercially from their research.
• Reset Button:
  • SCP-2000 is a facility built by the Foundation that contains backups of human culture and genetic material, which can be used to restart humanity in the event of catastrophe via cloning, education and eventual amnesticising of a planetary civilization's worth of humans. It's been used at least twice, possibly more.
  • Two of the most mysterious SCPs, 055 (which erases any information about itself from people's minds) and 579 (a very powerful infohazard whose file is almost entirely redactions), when put into contact with each other, will somehow turn back time and undo a catastrophe. This happens in the stories for both SCP-2998 and SCP-5000. The only clue to what's actually happening is in Keter Duty, a 001 proposal detailing how certain SCPs can be used to contain each other; 055 and 579 have an entry on that list, which simply says "can't fit round pegs in square holes".
• Retcon:
  • The Mass Edit, which was basically the wiki admins purging some of the more dubious entries and retconning out some of the more ludicrous (and humorous) aspects of the Backstory. (See below.)
  • Object Classes originally referred roughly to the object's danger level, though it was noted that "Safe" didn't necessarily mean "completely incapable of causing harm", just that it was understood enough that its hazardous effects couldn't be triggered without deliberation. Object Class was revised in 2014 to refer to how difficult it is to contain an object, regardless of its actual danger levels ("For example, a button that can destroy the entire universe when it's pressed would be safe, whereas a cat who randomly switches places with another cat anywhere on earth would be considered Keter.").
  • SCP-040:
    • An older version of her used to have telepathy which she couldn't fully control, but it was removed for obvious reasons.
    • She was also implied to have a crush on an older version of SCP-182, who was a benevolent teenaged telepath, and spoke to him via each other's respective telepathy. While that might've seemed cute at the time, it would be quite squicky now considering SCP-182 is now a middle-aged deaf and mute man who can transfer his consciousness to other people and effectively "ride" them.
    • SCP-040-1j used to be a chair with a mouth, now it's a blue and pink furred quadruped with no eyes or ears that 040 likes to use as a steed.
  • The main SCP-076 article was rewritten to remove the Mobile Task Force Omega-7 stuff, and make Able less "lolawesome". He's less of a Wolverine's expy now and more of a humanoid bundle of murder. He is also now completely hostile towards the Foundation; no longer is he working for any side. The Mobile Task Force Omega-7 stuff was later worked back in with key changes. The "official SCP-076 file" makes it very clear that he's In-Universe Chaotic Neutral at best, while the records of his time in Mobile Task Force Omega-7 state that the instant Able got bored again, he reverted back to slaughtering SCP personnel starting with Omega-7.
  • One part of Iris' containment backstory had her temporarily escape SCP custody after a sympathetic researcher told her that if her power conveniently disappeared, the facility would have no choice but to release her. She is recaptured when the higher ups get wind of this and — realizing that her excuse was obviously untrue — force her to use her powers in front of them, take her back into custody, and fire the researcher who helped her. This got retconned twice: first, by having the Ethics Committee see through their trick and never release her, then by erasing the whole thing when the interview between Iris and the researcher was removed. At present, the incident is still referenced as per the Ethics Committee catching it, but the interview is still deleted.
  • SCP-166 was formerly known as the Teenage Succubus. The article was heavily rewritten in 2020 to tone down the skeevy factor of such a thing, and she is now "Just a Teenage Gaea".
  • An older version of SCP-182 as a benevolent telepathic teenager who didn't age known as "Saint", but he was changed for a pretty obvious reason. He also had an "infatuation" with Able.
• Ret-Gone:
  • When Fishmonger (the writer) was banned, he demanded to have all of his characters and stories to be removed from the SCP Wiki. Some of his more famous characters were referenced in many articles. This left many gaps.
  • And before that, all of the SCPs deleted during the Mass Edit.
  • To make things even more confusing, since the numbers for Ret-Gone SCPs were freed up, the wiki wound up with new SCPs under old numbers. The weirdest case being SCP-098, which is mentioned in Dr Clef's SCP-001 proposal because it was a Hell Gate, but now the number is used for crabs. ("Truly these are the crabs that bring about the apocalypse.")
• Retraux: The Y2K theme is made to resemble the SCP Foundation site as if it had existed around the Turn of the Millennium. This includes a different and more limited color palette of greys and blues, usage of Microsoft Sans Serif, and a period-appropriate slogan ("A New Millennium in Security"). It has been used for anomalies that existed primarily around this same time period, such as SCP-5312 and SCP-5470.
• Revenge Before Reason: SCP-1322 is a hole to an alternate dimension, that after being accidentally hit with a Sterility Plague due to the Foundation, starts using said hole to send deadly weapons to our reality. Years after cutting contact, they still send it, often with the weaponry showing progress! Many the comments ask "why are they using their science for revenge instead of fixing the sterility"?
• Riddle for the Ages: All over the place, but especially in Series 1.
  • What is SCP-055? In a similar vein, what is SCP-579?
  • What does SCP-447 do when it comes into contact with a dead body?
  • What is Procedure 110-Montauk?
  • Which instance of SCP-3477 is the real Harold Holt? Are any of them the real Harold Holt?
• Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: A variation; the Foundation has access to technology called "Deepwell Storage", which allows digital data stored on a server in a Deepwell to resist changes to the timeline.
• Rock of Limitless Water:
  • Inverted with SCP-402, which absorbs limitless water.
  • SCP-045 producing water when exposed to nitrogen in an environment with less than 380 atmospheres of pressure.
• Roswell That Ends Well: It wasn't a spaceship; it was SCP-1051 prior to hatching, as well as a ruse to draw in victims.
• Room 101: The [[old SCP-100 entry was a porta-john that performs Mind Rape on anyone inside as soon as the door shuts. All the researchers could get from D-Class victims was that it grows enormous when the door is closed.
• Rule of Seven: SCP-231-7, the last survivor of seven girls rescued from a Religion of Evil, and the seven chains that hold SCP-2317 (six are broken). Given both involve The End of the World as We Know It if broken, they're invoking the Seven Seals in the Book of Revelation.
  • King Dyrmud of Hy-Brasil is described as having had seven wives over the course of his lifetime, all of whom met unfortunate ends due to a witch's curse.
• Rule 34: SCP-914 has frequently made this of an anthropomorphic female version of itself called Clockwork-Chan, at one point even rewriting its own file into what is basically a hentai fanfic.
• Running Gag:
  • Dr. King and apple seeds. ^ExplanationAny time he works with an object that alters or produces something, it always somehow ends up as apple seeds. For example, in the experiment logs for SCP-261, all Dr. King can get out of it is apple seeds. In the experiment logs for SCP-294, Dr. King requests "a cup of room-temperature superconductor"... and gets a cup of apple juice with seeds floating in it. And again in the experiment logs for SCP-978, Dr King's photo develops as... a closeup of an apple seed.
  • SCP-447 must NEVER come into contact with a dead body. It also turns everything green with a minty smell/taste.
  • SCP-055 is... Wait, what were we talking about?
  • All Foundation personnel are reminded that the SCPs are to be treated as powerful and dangerous artifacts at all times. They are not for use in pranks, party games, or to help with your hangover. ^ExplanationOlder and sillier articles often have either addenda or notes warning personnel to stop using them for pranks, party games, or as quick hangover remedies. This is being phased out and frowned upon, as a majority of the senior members now find it unfunny, trite, and unprofessional.
  • "Demoted to Keter Duty/D-Class" ^ExplanationThe practice of people committing exceptionally stupid acts being demoted to Keter Duty or D-Class. Nowadays, the former is considered unprofessional; would you want people who broke rules or screwed up a lot being assigned to the most dangerous items? While the latter is just considered plainly stupid and unnecessarily cruel. Unlike funny addenda, this gag serves the purpose of indicating how serious a Noodle Incident can be (like 447 coming into contact with dead bodies), rather than the results of personnel being silly. As such, the practice remains in old SCPs, and is acceptable to use when making references to those old articles.
  • SCP Insert Number Here was used against SCP-682. Attempt failed.
  • Researcher Darby always ends up causing some form of chaos when he experiments with SCP-914, specifically whenever he uses the Very Fine setting.
• Russian Reversal: SCP-956 is a piñata that comes to life and smashes kids apart, causing candy to spill out.

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